All kinds of book news this week! (Actually we’ve been saving it up.)

Alert Janeite Carol let us know that romance author Mary Balogh is working on an Austen-related anthology project with several other authors.

And I have just agreed to participate in another anthology, this one the brainchild of Susan Krinard, who thought it would be fun to write paranormal novellas based on various Jane Austen novels. She had already recruited Colleen Gleason and Janet Mullany by the time she asked me. I was hesitant as I have never written anything paranormal, but I always find it difficult to resist a challenge, especially when it involves nothing more arduous than using the imagination. And so I have my sights set upon making something paranormal of the basic plot idea of Persuasion. The tentative title for the anthology is Bespelling Jane, and it will contain two historical and two contemporary novellas. You may watch for it some time in the future–if we can catch the interest of a publisher, that is!

Keep your tongues in your cheeks, ladies, and we suspect it will work a lot better.

Hot on our discussion the other day about Austen first editions and memorabilia, we have the results of an auction of a collection of first editions at Bloomsbury Auctions, which went for a lot less than you might expect.

Other highlights included a group of privately owned first edition Jane Austen books. Austen’s first book, Sense and Sensibility , 1811, had a contemporary author attribution of “Miss Austen,” and it sold for $24,200. Pride and Prejudice, also in three volumes, made $33,300; Mansfield Park fetched $6,460, Emma made $11,400, and Northanger Abbey sold for just above its higher estimate at $7,250.

Again, unclear if the listing of NA included Persuasion; most likely, as that book is not otherwise mentioned in the collection.

EADT has an article about the influence of playwright Elizabeth Inchbald (author of the infamous “Lovers’ Vows”) on Jane Austen’s work.

The latest edition of the Jane Austen Podnovel is now available.

Alert Janeite Amo sent us an article about a spoof rewrite of Shakespeare in “yoof-speak.” The author of the piece takes it to the logical conclusion and rewrites a certain opening sentence.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” could become “You’re loaded, but got no bird. You some sort of bender?”

On that note, Gentle Readers, that’s it for Friday Bookblogging. Until next time, always remember: Books Are Nice!

Spring has arrived at AustenBlog World Headquarters, and our thoughts lightly turn to summer relaxation. It’s time for a roundup of recent and upcoming Jane Austen-related book releases, and we think there are some you will want to add to your beach bag. We also have some other Jane Austen-related book news, so put up your parasol and read on.

First, the latest Dalziel and Pascoe detective novel from Reginald Hill is an updated homage to Sanditon.

The characters created by Miss Austen are brought into the modern setting of a seaside area which the local landowners and monied types are trying to make wealthy through health. When a titled lady at the head of this bid is found roasting on her own hog spit, Dalziel’s right-hand man Pascoe arrives to investigate.

Yikes! What a fate for Lady Denham! But this sounds like the perfect beach read–unfortunately it’s only available in the UK at the moment.

Radio Riel has some podcasts of discussions that took place after the recent PBS broadcasts of Jane Austen adaptations.

The Panorama of the Mountains blog tells us that Jane Austen’s books soothe the savage breast.

Everyone loves a (well-written) romance. When I’ve volunteered at the Prison Book Program, some prisoners request trashy romance novels, but we’re prohibited from sending them sexual content. So they’re sent books by Austen and the Brontes instead. No one’s complained to my knowledge.

Other books that have recently been released include Elizabeth Aston’s latest novel, The Darcy Connection (we should have a review this week); a reprint of Joan Aiken’s Emma Watson, a completion of The Watsons; Jane Austen: Her Golden Years by Muriel Keller Evans, a novel that seems to be covering the same ground as Miss Austen Regrets; and for those who prefer books of information, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen looks like a scholarly take on an interesting subject.

Coming soon: the paperback version of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict will be released in a week or so; the much-anticipated U.S. release of Captain Wentworth’s Diary by Amanda Grange also occurs this month; a reprint of the first Jane Austen Mystery, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, also comes out later this month. A reprint of Park Honan’s biography of Jane Austen is due any day; a “Brief Life” also will be out very soon; and we just spotted another Joan Aiken reprint, Eliza’s Daughter, due out in November.

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging (hey, it’s still weekend in some places), so until next time, always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!

Alert Janeite Dana sent us a link to a blog post about Jane Austen the Medievalist, riffing off the New Yorker article we posted about in last week’s Bookblogging.

Alert Janeite Maria L. sent us an article about a book that could have been written by Charlotte Lucas. The premise is that women shouldn’t wait for the perfect man to marry, but grab the first half-decent one that comes along.

She says what makes for a great courtship doesn’t necessarily make for a great marriage. “I think, for a lot of people, if they actually went with (Jane Austen’s) Mr Darcy, they might not be that happy. What is he like dealing with diapers and paying the bills?”

We think Mr. Darcy employs people to do those sort of things for him, actually. And we think the premise of this book is very sad, indeed.

A poll reveals that one in ten British students confess to watching film adaptations rather than reading the books for class assignments. This is news?

A book of short stories written by Dalziel and Pascoe author Reginald Hill includes a sequel to Emma.

And who but a writer of Hill’s calibre would have the brass neck to take on Jane Austen at her own game and write a sequel to Emma, set 20 years after Miss Woodhouse’s marriage to Mr Knightley.

About ten dozen fan fic writers and Emma Tennant?

The couple are childless and still living with Emma’s creaking-gate father, a fact which has probably driven the once-perfect squire into a dissolute life in politics. Back into their lives comes the now-widowed Frank Churchill, who is keen to save Emma from a life of debt.

Miss Austen would, I feel, have been shocked but amused.

And she would have referred the author to her nephew’s Memoir, which included the information that Jane Austen said that Mr. Woodhouse survived Mr. and Mrs. Knightley’s marriage only by two years. But after all, there must be murder, and government cares not how much.

In other paraliterature news, Colonel Brandon’s Diary by Amanda Grange will be out in July 2008! (UK hardback edition–there will be a U.S. paperback edition sometime in 2009.) There’s preordering information at the link.

Laurie Viera Rigler has resumed her series of blog posts on Jane Austen’s novels with Emma.

These “a-ha” experiences are high on the list of reasons why I love Austen. I have this theory that if you read her works enough times and really contemplate the life lessons therein, you can pretty much give up your psychotherapist. You can even reduce your library of self-help books to Austen’s six novels. They are so much fun to read, so satisfying, so full of dramatic tension and hilarious commentary, that you hardly know you’re getting a life lesson at all. Which is exactly how I like my life lessons delivered.

We agree that much of the genius of Jane Austen (and her continuing popularity) lies in the truth of her novels. John Murray wrote to Walter Scott about Emma, “It wants incident and romance, does it not?” Silly, silly man!

Alert Janeite Sarah sent us a link to a very amusing article in the New Yorker about the recent trend of memoirs that turn out to be mostly invention (and invention is what delights us in novels, after all).

And when history books are wrong they can be miserably, badly, ridiculously wrong, a point that wasn’t lost on Jane Austen, who, in 1791, when she was sixteen, wrote a brilliant parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume, march-of-the-monarchs “History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II.” (Goldsmith, the author of the novel “The Vicar of Wakefield,” wrote history to keep out of debtors’ prison.) Austen called her parody “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.” It consisted of thirteen perfectly dunderheaded character sketches of crowned heads of England. Of Henry V, she wrote, “During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.” Of the Duke of Somerset: “He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that he should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.” Of the allegation that Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI’s cousin, read Greek: “Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I believe she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.” Once in a great while, Austen happened to bump into a fact or two, for which she apologized: “Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian.”

In other book news, Alert Janeites Laurel Ann and Lisa sent us a couple of links to an article about Penguin’s new endeavor with ebooks, which will be “enhanced” with “a filmography, period book reviews, recipes and black-and-white illustrations.” We were concerned about formatting, but the Publishers Weekly article claims the enhanced ebooks will be compatible with all readers. It’s a pretty good idea, as there are so many nicely formatted ebooks of public domain texts available in every format that publishers will have to offer extra content to get readers to pay money for them. Jimmy Guterman of O’Reilly disagrees.

Although ebooks should have extras, those extras should take advantage of the interactive medium, not merely deliver more — and inferior — text.

Inferior? Jane Austen? Harrrumph. Or does he mean etexts are inferior to paper? Trust us, as a dedicated ebook user, once you start reading and get lost in the story, the medium in which the story is delivered becomes completely transparent. And besides, “interactive medium” indicates a connection to the Internet, which all ebook readers (meaning the electronic devices) do NOT have, and which many ebook readers (meaning people reading books) don’t want.

What’s most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn’t attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn’t you be more likely to try something new if it was free?

As we already pointed out, there are already tons of free ebooks of public domain texts available everywhere in every format. The publishers have to do something different to get people to buy them. We would like to see some scholarly notes and essays along with the more fun stuff, by the bye; there’s plenty of room for all.

In other news, two recent entries in Norm Geras’ Writer’s Choice blog series on Normblog mention Jane Austen. Meg Rosoff discusses the different layers of Pride and Prejudice:

Above and beyond the love story - people who would never consider reading the book have swooned over various film and TV versions - Pride and Prejudice is actually a book about class, about fortunes on the way up and down, inherited wealth versus new wealth, good marriages and bad, gentlemen and bounders, and the emerging English middle class at the end of the 18th century.

…and Olivia Lichtenstein writes about the continuing fascination of filmmakers with Pride and Prejudice:

In the past decade alone, Pride and Prejudice has spawned a BBC costume drama, an Oscar-winning feature film, a Bollywood version (Bride and Prejudice), the books Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, its sequel - arguably amongst the biggest of recent publishing sensations - and, of course, by extension, the two feature films they engendered. This year, a spoof Pride and Prejudice is planned, Jane Austen Handheld, a film which is to star Stephen Fry, Russell Brand and Lily Allen. I wonder whether frequent repetition diminishes the value of the original work of art, or at the least, people’s perception of it.

Naaaaaah.

And lastly, Alert Janeite Lisa pointed us to the Blogger News Network, which has a review of Pemberley Remembered, a new P&P sequel; we’ll have a review here at AustenBlog next week.

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, so until next week, remember: Books Are Nice!

Pray forgive the dearth of posting of late. We’ve developed a nasty allergy to the computer this week, but seem to be getting over it.

Continuing our theme of electronic books as we wrap up Read an Ebook Week, we were really pleased to hear from Linda (also known as Linda Fern), who has digitized a really valuable resource for Janeites, The Loiterer. From the introduction:

The centrepiece of this collection is James Austen’s The Loiterer, a periodical of sixty issues published in Oxford in 1789 and 1790. James wrote the majority of the issues with his brother, Henry, among others, contributing articles. After the final issue was published in 1790, James had the entire sixty issues bound into two volumes and published with a limited number of copies. A “pirated” Dublin edition was published in 1792.

[. . .]

After reading The Loiterer in its entirety, I considered it to be a valuable adjunct for understanding Jane Austen’s life, world and works. Also, it may possibly answer some questions that have eluded us as to what and when Jane Austen knew on some subject or other..

We agree! Linda also has collected the content of the late Ashton Dennis’ “Male Voices in Praise of Jane Austen” website and a series of essays about “Jane Austen and the Wars” by R. Jason Everett. We strongly encourage our Gentle Readers to check it out–and bookmark the site and plan to return, there’s lots of good stuff here to read.

Also expanding on our post of earlier this week, Harry T. has uploaded Mobipocket format ebooks of Emma (with the Brock illustrations), Jane Austen’s Minor Works, including just about everything that isn’t a novel, and the Brabourne edition of Jane Austen’s Letters to MobileRead.

Ms. Place at Jane Austen’s World has post about the Thomson illustrated Complete Jane Austen, with a link to Google Books.

And in the “What the Heck Is It?” department, Alert Janeite Julie P. sent us a link last week, and Maisy has also linked it in comments, to P&P by “DVD Bookshelf.” As near as we can figure, it displays the text onscreen as a narrator reads it. Is this supposed to be a film for the strictest purists or something? Besides, when we listen to an audiobook we like to multi-task: needlework, housework, craft projects, HTML coding…

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books (including Electronic Books) Are Nice!

This post was made possible by Pat Benatar’s Greatest Hits, which we sung along with badly, with accompanying head banging and shoulder shimmying, to help us to break out of our blogging malaise. We even managed to wake up the Wickhams at the crack of 3 p.m. George just screamed at Lydia to “put on a (expletive deleted) shirt.” Oh my.

We are Bookblogging midweek since A. we didn’t get around to it over the weekend and B. It’s Read an Ebook Week! We have had our Cybook Gen3 for a few weeks now and it rocks our socks. Naturally one of the first things we did was download all of Jane Austen’s novels, plus Lady Susan, Love and Freindship, the Memoir, Life and Letters, and a couple of other interesting oddments to our Cybook. And not only do we have all of Jane Austen’s work (and work about her), we have books by the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, L.M. Montgomery, Dickens, and a metric truckload of Trollope–and much more–and we are using maybe 5 percent of the capacity of our 1GB SD card. We carry this device around with us daily. The Cybook is the thinnest and lightest reader with an eInk screen, though the cover adds some heft to it, but it fits easily in our smallish handbag. We have played with a co-worker’s Kindle and were extremely impressed by the ease of use. We thought the interface seemed kludgy before we used it, but it’s amazingly intuitive. We also have heard many wonderful things about the Sony Reader, and if you don’t mind or even prefer a backlit display there is the eBookwise, or you can use your Treo or BlackBerry or mobile phone or PDA to read eReader or Mobipocket format books. (We still have many eReader format books on our Treo.)

Incidentally, all of the books we mentioned above were free. We also received $50 in downloads of paid books from BooksOnBoard when we purchased our Cybook (haven’t used it all yet). But most public domain books, for all devices, are free to download from somewhere. Manybooks.net probably has the best selection, both of books and of formats; Feedbooks has a smaller selection but its books are really nicely formatted. Community members at MobileRead have digitized dozens of public domain books in various formats, and MobileReader Harry T. has uploaded lovely ebooks of Jane Austen’s novels in Mobipocket and Sony Reader formats, including the C.E. Brock illustrations from Molland’s and Solitary Elegance! We just downloaded five of the Big Six in Mobipocket format to enjoy on our Cybook.

Admittedly, ebook readers, especially the eInk readers such as the Cybook, Kindle, Reader, and iRex iLiad, which are the top of the line technology (and correspondingly expensive), are still in early adopter territory. We can see that they may not work for some readers; though we are really impressed with how well Amazon has done in making the Kindle work out of the box even for the non-tech-savvy and in providing a variety of content. DRM is an issue, which is going away with music but still very much an issue with ebooks; the main problem with DRM is portability between devices, and the Kindle and Reader use proprietary ebook formats. But for those of us who mostly read classics anyway, it’s not as much of an issue; there really is a tremendous amount of totally free public domain content out there, and everyone is at least talking about DRM. Whether it will do any good remains to be seen.

We used to say “Can’t curl up in bed with a computer, so we’ll never read ebooks.” Well, you can certainly curl up with one of the latest generation of readers; and some intrepid types even take them into the tub and on to the beach, properly protected of course. We still read and collect and enjoy paper books, but we are really enjoying our adventures in ebooks. Incidentally, stay tuned–we’ll be adding some new etext titles at Molland’s very soon! We’re happy to answer any of our Gentle Readers’ questions about ebooks or the Cybook in comments.

Speaking of digital text, JASNA has digitized Persuasions No. 10, which includes essays from the 1988 AGM in Chicago (which is, of course, where the AGM will be this year as well). The theme of the conference was “Jane Austen’s England” and the list of papers, both related to the conference and not, look fascinating.

The News Observer (North Carolina) has an article about the Everyman’s Library, currently featured at an exhibition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library.

Early dust jackets were graced with Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that “The true university in these days is a collection of books.” The Everyman’s edition of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” was graced with Sir Philip Sidney’s lovely line, “A tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner.”

We’ve updated the list of upcoming books and those currently on the shelf in the menu at right. Hopefully we’ll get it together to do a post highlighting all the latest publications!

That’s it for Friday Weekend Midweek Bookblogging, and always remember, Gentle Readers: Whether electronic or paper, Books Are Nice!

Lots of bookblogging to do this week! Huzzah! *AustenBlog Cheerleading and Dance Team begins chanting “Books Are Nice! Books Are Nice!”*

First up we have a real treat: photographs of a first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice! Julie T. tells the story in an e-mail to the Editrix:

My wonderful son is visiting his girlfriend at Wesleyan University. Today they went to the school’s rare book room, and look what Jake asked to see! It’s a first edition, and please note the name inscribed in the front cover, “Harriet Gardiner.” What could be more appropriate for the owner of this book (other than, perhaps, Elizabeth Darcy)

Click on the thumbnails below for larger images:

Photos by Jake Zien

Thanks so much to Jake and Julie for sharing the images, and for allowing us to post them.

Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, Laurie Viera Rigler continues her series at About.com’s Classic Literature blog with a really lovely entry on P&P. (more…)

Laurie Viera Rigler continues her series on Jane Austen’s novels at the About.com Classic Lit blog, this week writing about Mansfield Park.

If you’ve ever had an opinion that your friends considered uncool, and you stuck to it despite ridicule and pressure, you’ll find a kindred spirit in Fanny Price, and you’ll want her reward to be the man she loves. However, if you’re still doing shots with your inner bad girl, you’ll be rooting for Mary Crawford to win the object of her, and Fanny’s, affections.

Heh.

Whilst trolling manybooks.net for free e-books, we happened on a site called The Best Media in Life is Free, which has a listing of free e-texts of books from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The listings are broken up into Pre-1700, 1700s (The first two on the list…The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho!), 1800s (including Jane Austen’s novels), and 1900s. Now that is what we call a reading list! We recommend manybooks.net for e-books in just about any format you need; and feedbooks.com also has a wonderful list of free public domain e-books, which have been beautifully formatted for easy and pleasant reading.

Speaking of e-books, a while back we snarked on the Kindle a bit, but in the past week had the opportunity to play with one. We take back our fugly comment, because the Kindle is anything but. It’s really quite cute! It’s tiny and clean-looking, and it makes using and reading e-books an incredibly easy experience. You just push a button and get a book in seconds; which might pose a problem if one is not careful with paid downloads, but feedbooks.com has set up a really easy way to get free, nicely formatted public domain e-books on your Kindle as easily as you download them from Amazon. Download their Kindle Download Guide, which installs as a book, and “shop” for free e-books right from the guide. We are having serious gadget lust and need to get an eInk e-book reader SOON! It probably still will be a Cybook Gen3; but we really love the ease of use of the Kindle.

Adventures in Reading reviews Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart by Valerie Grosvenor Myer.

Austen is described as a person with charm and wit, but also as an individual looked down upon socially as being rather “backwards” or common by her family later in life. Some of Austen’s nieces and nephews are described as rather snobbish and prudish (they would be entering the Victorian period after all) and Myers discusses how parts of Austen’s life were “white washed” in the years after her death by her family. Myers’ approaches a “sour grape” perspective on Austen’s life versus the romantic entanglements of her heroine’s.

Lori Smith, the author of A Walk With Jane Austen, was interviewed at the She Plants a Vineyard blog.

SPV: Many women love Jane Austen’s novels. What is it about her novels that are so timeless and that we can relate to?
Lori: There are lots of answers to that question—her writing is lovely, she herself had a wonderful wit and energy for life, which comes through in her stories, they’re full of humor and her characters are people that we still recognize today. And she’s writing about falling in love, which is an awful lot of fun on its own. But there’s much more substance to her than just the romance.

I think a big part of it is the character that Austen wove into her stories. They’re not so much about falling in love as they are about the kind of people who are allowed to fall in love, people whose characters have been refined, who have been willing to admit their own faults and change. They’re worthy. I think that gives her stories incredible strength—which sometimes movies and spin-offs miss.

We were referred to A Great Undoing, Natalie Jenner’s entry in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award competition. The novel is a modern retelling of Persuasion, set in Montauk, Long Island and Manhattan in the 1960s. You can download and read a free excerpt and leave feedback. The novel currently is a semi-finalist in the competition and will advance to the next round based upon the feedback that the excerpt receives, so get to it, Janeites!

And we are reminded that we have not updated our sidebar book links in a very long time, and hope to get to that task this week. That’s it for this week’s Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books Are Nice!

With all the excitement over the Complete Jane Austen, we would like to take this opportunity to issue our periodic reminder that Jane Austen wrote six novels, not just the one with that moody Darcy git (TEAM TILNEY REPRESENT!), and if you haven’t tried them all yet, there’s no time like the present! And even after you finish the Big Six, there’s more Jane to read–let us know if you need a list.

Laurie Viera Rigler, the author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, is writing a series on each of Jane Austen’s novels for About.com’s Classic Literature blog in conjunction with the films. Last’s week’s Bookblogging included her Persuasion post, and this week she wrote about Northanger Abbey.

Every era likes to marginalize certain forms of art. In Austen’s day, it was the novel (and not just the Gothic ones). Today, it might be graphic novels or romance or so-called “women’s fiction” or “chick lit” or science fiction or horror. Take your pick. Despite the snobbery, Jane Austen and her whole family were, in her own words, “great Novel-readers, & not ashamed of being so.” Nevertheless, Northanger Abbey is a hilarious send-up of just the kind of horror-and-romance-fest that Catherine Morland—and Jane Austen—liked to read. The difference between the heroine and her creator is that Catherine Morland kept expecting real life to play out like one of her favorite novels, while Jane Austen thought real life had its own set of fascinating stories to tell.

The Adventures in Reading blog has a few posts examining Persuasion, which, as many of our readers know, is our favorite Jane. The first part has an anecdote that made our jaw drop:

My sophomore year in college a classmate of mine told me about his experience with Persuasion in another class. While I cannot recall what he said the instructor had said, I do recall that he argued the novel was classist and he felt Anne Elliot was a “gold digger.”

WHAAAAAAAAT? Anne Elliot, of all people, a gold digger? Our Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness, let us show you it.

Part 2 has more reflections upon the novel–it’s always so interesting to hear from someone making their first engaged read.

Another character I have yet to mention but that plays an enormous part is Mrs. Smith. Anne knew Mrs. Smith from her school days and only knew that shortly after Anne left the school that this woman became Mrs. Smith and seemed to have married quite well. When Anne rediscovers her, Mrs. Smith is an invalid, dependent on the “kindness of strangers”, selling hand made crafts through a friend, and living most of her life in two small and shabby rooms. Mrs. Smith plays a key role in revealing Mr. Elliot’s (the cousin and heir) true character to Anne, but I will say I found her more of a remarkable character after reading about Austen’s own invalid brother. Perhaps there is no connection, but at the very least Mrs. Smith is a very interesting comparison to Lady de Bourgh’s daughter in Pride & Prejudice.

We doubt Mrs. Smith had anything to do with George Austen, but it is interesting to contrast her treatment, as someone who is genuinely ill–indeed, crippled to the point of being unable to walk–and yet bears with her infirmities and her deplorable financial situation with cheer; and (this always gets us) as poor as she is, she seeks to sell her little knitted items to do good for even poorer people. As a comparison with hypochondriacs such as Mary Musgrove, Mrs. Bennet, and, yes, Anne de Bourgh (though we have no way of knowing if she was really ill or not), and considering that Persuasion was written as Jane Austen was suffering the first symptoms of her fatal illness, Mrs. Smith is a truly amazing character.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books Are Nice!

Just a quickie this week, since unfortunately it’s all about the films at the moment, but we would like to draw our Gentle Readers’ attention back at least momentarily to the fact that all these new films are based upon novels, and indeed very good ones.

ETA: We nearly forgot! The discussion of The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom will begin Sunday (that’s tomorrow) at Molland’s. Jump right in to the discussion.

Laurie Viera Rigler, author of The Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, has written a really lovely article about Persuasion for about.com.

If you’ve ever felt like your family didn’t treat you the way they should; if you’ve ever been misunderstood, misled, or misguided in any way, then Persuasion will speak your language. If you’ve ever yielded to the opinions of others over what your heart told you to do, if you’ve ever given up someone because you were told you had to, if you’ve ever wasted even a tiny bit of this short life holding onto resentment instead of opening up to forgiveness and love; then you will get your second chance to make things right with Persuasion.

We especially agree with this part:

And as an added bonus, the book has the best love letter of any novel you’ll ever read.

YES! Thanks to Alert Janeite Laura S. for the link!

The Telegraph has an interesting article about reading among the younger generation, which touches a bit on Jane Austen.

But does it matter? Isn’t an obsession with books just an out-of-date, middle-class hang-up?

Ministers don’t lament the fact that people don’t paint watercolours any more. Posh and Becks admit they never open a book and they haven’t done too badly.

Depends upon the value one places on not doing too badly.

It is unfair to blame children’s disenchantment with books on computers and DVDs when most adults prefer slumping in front of a screen to curling up on the sofa with a book.

You can’t expect your child to read - rather than watch - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when you have just sat through Sense and Sensibility without any intention of picking up a Jane Austen. If you spend evenings on eBay and never get round to finishing the latest Robert Harris, you’re not an ideal role model.

Yes! Perhaps that’s the answer for children who are too young to handle Jane Austen’s work–read it to them, or better yet, with them.

That’s all for Weekend Bookblogging this week, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books Are Nice!

Alert Janeite Jenny let us know that the Kansas City Public Library is about to start a “Jane-uary” program, with a month-long series of events, including lectures, films, and group discussions. Reservations are required for many of the events, so check out the site and send ‘em in! They also have a Jane-uary blog.

Alert Janeite Cate wrote to ask if we had heard of a series of young adult novels by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer set in the Regency and incorporating a school of magical training, sort of like Jane Austen meets Harry Potter or, as Cate put it, “a junior version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” Don’t think they’re derivative, though; a reviewer pointed out that the first book was published in 1987, long before either J.K. Rowling or Susannah Clarke pulled out their own wands and started writing. The series includes Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality, and The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After. We had never heard of these books but plan to look them up, once we’re a little more caught up in our to-do list!

Speaking of upcoming reading, some of us who hang out at Molland’s will be reading The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom. If that title sounds familiar, it’s one of the “Northanger Novels” that Isabella Thorpe lists for the benefit of her new friend Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey:

“Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

Attentive Janeites also will remember that Mr. Austen read The Midnight Bell, as Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on 24 October, 1798:

My father is now reading the ‘Midnight Bell,’ which he has got from the library, and mother sitting by the fire.

One presumes he enjoyed it; as Jane once wrote, the Austens were novel-readers and not ashamed of it. It sounds like a real corker, too!

Young Alphonsus Cohenburg enters his mother’s bedroom and finds her covered in blood. She tells him his uncle has murdered his father, and orders him to flee Cohenburg castle forever to save his own life!

A disconsolate exile, Alphonsus wanders the earth seeking the means of survival, first as a soldier, then a miner, and finally as sacristan of a church, where he meets the beautiful Lauretta. They wed and establish a home together, and everything seems to promise them a happy future. But their domestic tranquillity is shattered, when a band of ruffians kidnaps the unfortunate Lauretta! Alphonsus must solve the mystery of Lauretta’s disappearance and the riddle of his mother’s strange conduct. And when he hears that ghosts inhabit Cohenburg castle, tolling the great bell each night at midnight, the mystery only deepens….

Horrid indeed! The schedule for our reading is not yet determined but likely will start the second week in January, er, Jane-uary, so there’s plenty of time to get a copy and join us! We will be sure to let you know when the final schedule has been determined.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging, and always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!

Nothing like waiting till the last minute, is there?

The Adventures in Reading blog is delighted by Northanger Abbey, but then, aren’t all right-thinking people? (more…)

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us an editorial from the Sydney Morning Herald about the importance–and pleasure–of reading, wisely quoting the Rev. Mr. Tilney, which is always a smart thing to do in our educated opinion.

The novel Northanger Abbey, one of Jane Austen’s less read works, has a gentle dig at the contorted plotlines and melodramatic expression of the gothic novels popular in the author’s day.

But still Austen offers a defence of the novel, having her hero Henry Tilney say, “the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid”.

Today’s students need Jane Austen (and other authors who have stood the test of time) as much as ever. Good fiction is not a waste of time.

Preach it!

As well as helping us understand the world, fiction helps us understand ourselves. Jane Austen’s heroines are appealing (except, perhaps, the insipid Fanny Price)

Uh-oh….*runs as enraged Fannyfans burn down Sydney Morning Herald building*

Lisa also sent us a really funny article in the New Statesman by Sophie Gee, who has found a great new way to choose Christmas gift books: apply the Sir Walter Elliot test!

This new approach was suggested by the opening sentences of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which give the best description of reading I know:

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

Even as we laugh at Sir Walter for his snobbishly trivial turn of mind, we admire Austen for putting her finger so exactly on what gives reading its delight: “occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one”. Which of us doesn’t have an equivalent of the Baronetage to take down in hours of need, hoping that nobody is looking?

Well, that would probably be Jane Austen’s books for us! And a few select titles by Georgette Heyer. Do read the whole article, it’s really fun.

The audio version of Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict got a great review in Publishers’ Weekly:

Orlagh Cassidy is delightfully fun as Courtney Stone, a modern Los Angeles girl nursing a heartbreak who wakes up to find herself inhabiting the body and life of a Jane Austenesque Regency girl. Cassidy is spot-on with Courtney’s California accent, modern-day moaning about men, self-analysis and doubt, and sarcasm—and then, without missing a beat, flips easily into the proper, upper-class English tones of Jane (the Regency girl Courtney has replaced, whose accent came with the body), her pompous, controlling mother, her desperate suitor and her sympathetic best friend.

We are pleased to report that the U.S. release of Captain Wentworth’s Diary by Amanda Grange is available for preorder and will be released on May 6, 2008. Check out the cover on Amanda Grange’s website.

Lastly, we heard from Professor Janet Todd, who gave a great plenary talk at the JASNA AGM in Vancouver this past October. She has written a book called Death and the Maidens about the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley-Byron circle of Jane Austen’s lifetime–authors, poets, and amazing and sad lives. Prof. Todd found some kinship between Fanny Wollstonecraft, who committed suicide at 22, and Fanny Price. It sounds like a really interesting book, and insight into a very different kind of lifestyle than that which Jane Austen and her family–and even her characters–led.

That’s it for Friday Bookblogging this week, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books Are Nice!

We are pleased to report that Lydia Bennet’s Story by Jane Odiwe is available for preorder from Amazon.co.uk and will be released on December 1. More information about the book is available at Austen Effusions:

In Lydia’s Story, Jane Odiwe takes us back to Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice, to a Regency world seen through Lydia Bennet’s eyes where officers, pleasure and marriage are the only pursuits. The events that Austen did not relate are revealed, we follow her comical adventures and are privy to her every folly, every romantic whim. All the characters we love and recognise are there with many new ones besides. From Hertfordshire to Brighton, Newcastle and Bath, to the end of Pride and Prejudice and beyond, we learn of Lydia’s quest for true love.

While we understand that Miss Lydia’s character is not exactly redeemed in the story, she is given a somewhat more sympathetic treatment than she has received in the past.

For the purposes of her wonderful book, Jane Austen quite rightly paints Lydia in a less than flattering light, but for the purposes of mine, I hope I have managed to give her a sympathetic hearing, which I believe she deserves, despite her penchant for silliness and folly. Her heart rules her head, her tongue has a habit of running away with her and she acts without thinking but I confess, I could not resist her and have grown to be very fond of Lydia for all her faults.

Don’t forget to check out Miss Lydia’s Blog for a preview of the book and the lovely illustrations.

We just heard that Amanda Grange’s latest Austen hero retelling, Edmund Bertram’s Diary, will be released on November 30, though Amazon UK claims to be shipping it; you can save a few pounds (not to mention postage and packing) if you order directly from Robert Hale. For the more patient in North America, Berkeley will be publishing a paperback version next year, along with Captain Wentworth’s Diary, though we don’t have dates on those yet. We are told a copy of His Lordship of W’ville’s diary is on its way to AustenBlog World Headquarters, so expect a review soon. (Up next…Colonel Brandon’s Diary, which we are told contains “Frustrated elopements, affairs, divorce, consumption, illegitimate children, a duel” and other good stuff! Who knew Jane Austen wrote melodrama? Just as backstory, of course.)

It also has been whispered in our shell-pink ear that Berkeley will be publishing a paperback edition of The Confession of Fitzwilliam Darcy by Mary Street, long considered the Holy Grail of Jane Austen paraliterature, next March. Team Darcy is no doubt dancing in the streets in anticipation.

Mr. Knightley’s Diary is of course available from Berkeley now, as well as e-book editions for Mobipocket, eReader, MS Reader, Adobe, and even a Kindle edition.

Some may be asking, “What’s a Kindle edition?” The Kindle is a new e-book reading device that was launched with great fanfare by Amazon this week. The device, and the Kindle edition e-books that work on it, are only sold by Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said he wanted to make the iPod of e-book readers, and we don’t think he quite succeeded, but he might have come really close. The really new and interesting thing about the Kindle is that it contains a wireless radio so that users can purchase and download books without using their computer. The book will be downloaded directly to the Kindle. The books are competitively priced (a bone of contention among e-book readers; usually prices for e-book editions of hardback books are about the same as the paper copy) at $9.99 for New York Times bestsellers and less for many older books. We think the main selling point of the Kindle is the eInk screen, which is not backlit like a PDA or computer monitor and is the closest electronic imitation of paper that is available right now. The Sony Reader also has an eInk screen, as do the Bookeen Cybook Gen3 and the iRex iLiad. Just about any PDA or smartphone (including Palm, PocketPC, and BlackBerry devices, and we believe iPhones can handle ebooks after a fashion) can be used as ebook readers, as can any computer, and while we love the portability of carrying dozens of books on our Treo, we find that our eyes grow tired after a while of reading on a backlit screen, especially as we spend a lot of time using a PC.

One of the selling points of the Kindle was the availability of more than 90,000 books on launch, and we were pleased to see Jane Austen well-represented, including her own books as well as various paraliterature titles. Also, the Kindle can use unencrypted Mobipocket, HTML, and text documents, so it is possible to use the free versions of Jane Austen’s novels at Project Gutenberg or manybooks.net. This also is true for just about every e-book reader available. The article in Newsweek touting the launch of the Kindle even mentions Jane Austen in a couple of places:

And, to soothe the anxieties of print-culture stalwarts, in sleep mode the Kindle displays retro images of ancient texts, early printing presses and beloved authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen.

and

A company called DailyLit this year began sending out books—new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors like Jane Austen—straight to your e-mail IN BOX, in 1000-work chunks. (I’ve been reading Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” on my iPhone, a device that is expected to be a major outlet for e-books in the coming months.) And recently a columnist for the Chicago Tribune waxed rhapsodically about reading Jane Austen on his BlackBerry.

In our opinion, the Kindle is a great first step for a true e-reader for the masses. It’s easy to use and has a wide selection of titles; by the time one works one’s way through what is already available plus what can be picked up for free around the Internet, we’re sure even more titles will become available. However, there are some concerns. The most important of these concerns, in our opinion, is that the Kindle editions use a proprietary format that includes digital rights management to prevent copying. That means you can’t read Kindle editions on any other device; you can’t even buy a Kindle edition if you don’t own a Kindle that is linked to your Amazon account. You can read some other formats on your Kindle, but if you’re an early adopter of e-books and already have a library of DRM-protected Adobe PDF or Mobipocket format e-books, or any flavor of eReader books, you are out of luck. They can’t be read on the Kindle or converted to read on the Kindle. (Non-DRMed Mobipocket is supported natively and non-DRMed PDFs can be converted for reading on the Kindle.) Beta and VHS, anyone? And what happens if Amazon decides to get out of digital books in a few years? How are you supposed to read all those books you bought for the Kindle with the click of a button? Neil Gaiman and Mark Pilgrim discuss two views of DRM related to the Kindle. Of course, the proprietary format of iTunes downloads hasn’t affected the popularity of the iPod any, though of course it’s much easier to convert your physical media for use on the iPod than it is to convert a book for use on a Kindle. (You have to scan the book and format it. We’ve done it, but we’re a little nuts.)

Cory Doctorow, an author and evangelist for freedom in digital media, writes about some of the privacy concerns with the Kindle at BoingBoing. We think many consumers won’t be a bit put off by these issues, but his criticism is important. It’s one thing for a company to keep records of what you’ve purchased from them and use that information for future marketing purposes (and one of the things we love about Amazon is getting suggestions of things we will like based upon other things we’ve purchased), but knowing when and how you read a book, what you’ve bookmarked, how many times you’ve read it, is just a little creepy and Orwellian for our taste. The information gathering should stop at purchase, in our opinion.

And, we hate to say it, but the Kindle puts the fug in fugly. We like the idea of a keyboard for notes and annotations, but there’s an awful lot of wasted real estate there. Half the reason to have a dedicated e-book reader is portability! Keep it small, and reserve most of the surface area for the screen. This is not difficult to figure out. And, being tied to the Sprint network, the Kindle is currently US-centric, as the type of wireless signal used by Sprint is not used outside the U.S.

So why is the Kindle important to Janeites? We think it is an important step in making e-books easy to buy and use and raise the consciousness of e-books in the public eye; it also will fuel the development of other readers, and speed availability of many of our favorite authors’ books in digital format. (Hint: Georgette Heyer! Dorothy L. Sayers! Patrick O’Brian! C’mon, publishers!) The latter is important even for owners of devices other than the Kindle, as once a book is converted to text for the Kindle, it’s fairly easy to also make it available in other formats (see Mr. Knightley’s Diary, above). And again, why is this important to Janeites? Because there is 200 years of scholarship and publishing related to Jane Austen. Imagine having everything ever written about Jane Austen on instant demand. And the Kindle has a web browser–one even can use it to access the e-text library at Molland’s, for instance. There is lots of stuff out there, and we would like to see more, and we would like to download it all to our eInk device of choice and carry it around with us, for we are greedy when it comes to Jane Austen. We’ve contributed a mite to this archive of Janeite knowledge with our e-texts at Molland’s (and will be contributing more in future). Won’t it be a wonderful thing when books never go out of print? When we won’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for an obscure paraliterature title from the 1940s, because it’s available for a few dollars as a download? No one will have to warehouse it or pay for it to be printed; just give it server room. That will indeed be a wonderful thing for Janeites.

And guys, the Kindle can help you get chicks. Maybe.

Incidentally, Santa is bringing a Cybook Gen3 to AustenBlog World Headquarters next month (if it doesn’t sell out before the elves get there to pick it up, that is). Expect a full report. And we would love to hear from anyone who purchased a Kindle.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and remember: Books Are Nice!

We just finished a long-overdue updating of our sidebar items, and the press’ fascination with Jane Austen does not seem to be subsiding; the press groans with upcoming volumes, with everything from scholarly commentary to biography to paraliterature. Let’s get to it!

Recent releases include Just Jane by Nancy Moser and its companion edition of Pride and Prejudice as well as The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James; we will have reviews (and giveaways) of these books soon. Also look for a review of Lovers’ Perjuries; Or, The Clandestine Courtship Of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill: A retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma by Joan Ellen Delman, which has considerably brightened our daily commute for the past two weeks. On the nonfiction side, Lori Smith’s book A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love, and Faith is available; read the AustenBlog review, and congratulations to Jenny, the winner of our giveaway for a copy of the book.

The upcoming books cross all areas of Austen-related interest, from nonfiction to fiction. On the nonfiction side, there are re-releases of Jill Heydt-Stevenson’s Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History and Park Honan’s biography Jane Austen: Her Life. We’re looking forward to In the Garden With Jane Austen by Kim Wilson, author of Tea With Jane Austen. Harold Bloom’s How to Write About Jane Austen should be, um, interesting. Other nonfiction titles include Critical Companion to Jane Austen: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work by William Baker; Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen by Jenny Davidson; Jane Austen (Brief Lives) by Fiona Stafford; Jane Austen (Writers and Their Works) by Andrew Haggerty; Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists by Peter W. Graham; Reading the Nineteenth-century Novel: Austen to Eliot by Alison Case and Harry E. Shaw; and Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen by Peter Leithart.

On the fiction side, there are several new paraliterature titles coming up, including Ball at Pemberley: A Gentle Joke, Jane Austen Style, an intriguing title, by Elizabeth Newark; Emma & Knightley: The Sequel to Jane Austen’s Emma, by Rachel Billington, which we guess is a reprinting of the book by the same author titled Perfect Happiness; a reprint of Emma Watson: Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novel Completed by the late Joan Aiken; and Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma by Diana Birchall.

We also noticed that Signet has overhauled their low-priced paperback versions of Jane Austen’s novels with new covers and afterwords by various romance novelists; so far Amazon is listing Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. (Why the pic of a birdcage on P&P? It seems to us more fitting for MP. I can’t get out, said the starling.)

Speaking of editions of Jane Austen’s novels, Alert Janeite Laurel Ann sent us a slightly risqué cover image from a French translation of Sense and Sensibility; link might not be safe for work.

Lastly, Emma Campbell Webster, author of Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure, wrote an article about happy-ever-after endings for the Guardian.

Austen always gives her protagonists at least one opportunity to say no to marriage before they finally agree - highlighting the seriousness of the decision - and I found it more and more disconcerting that, when the lead character does take the plunge, her story suddenly ends. It dawned on me that this convention sends readers a dark subliminal message - that marriage equals “The End”. Which raises the question “Just what, exactly, is it the end of?” Is it simply the end of the book, or could it signify the end of life worth reading or writing about?

Judging by some of the things Jane Austen told her nieces and nephews about the later lives of her characters, we think not.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging (actually on a Friday!), and always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!

When some authors of Jane Austen’s time needed their characters to fall ill for the sake of fiction, they usually endowed them with some sort of unidentifiable “fever” or other illness that either killed them or gave them the opportunity for deathbed confessions of murder or love. However, Jane Austen’s own characters usually have somewhat explainable illnesses, despite the fact that medicine in her time was not what one would call advanced, and she didn’t have the Internet to do research, let alone weekly episodes of CSI.

The BBC has taken a look at three fictional heroines–Marianne Dashwood; Catherine Earnshaw Linton of Wuthering Heights; and Lady Dedlock of Bleak House–and consulted physicians in an attempt to identify their fatal (or in Marianne’s case, near-fatal) illnesses.

Marianne is ill twice.

In the first half of the book, it is an episode of general swooning and not eating but in the second half, it is a life threatening fever - and you may guess what caused it. Yes, tripping through wet grass. Austen tells us only that the illness was an infection of “putrid tendency”.

Dr Jane Leese, infectious disease specialist at the Department of Health, thinks that this might suggest typhus, which was also known as putrid fever.

And Marianne had just returned in a coach from London where it was rife.

However Dr Leese plumps instead for a streptococcal sore throat, followed by septicaemia.

On the other hand, Dr Neil Vickers, reader in literature and medicine at King’s College London, thinks Marianne’s illness is simply a plot device.

Spoilsport!

He claims Austen needs a life threatening illness in order to return the previously overexcitable Marianne to the “sense” of the book’s title.

Well, of course she did, but just relax and have a little fun with it! Thanks to Alert Janeites Sue and Lisa for sending us this link.

Speaking of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, a new edition of her History of England has been published along with an edited version of Charles Dickens’ History of England.

“It is the work of an exceptionally bright, if jaundiced, teenager imbued with the egoism and flippancy to be expected of such provenance,” says the introduction by David Starkey, a prize-winning historian from Britain’s Cambridge University. “In fact perhaps the most valuable thing about her history is the glimpse it gives us of a highly talented adolescent on her way to greatness.”

If you haven’t read Jane Austen’s History of England, we recommend it highly.

Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune decided to try reading e-books on his BlackBerry, and what better book to start with than Pride and Prejudice?

It is a truth too rarely acknowledged, that a commuter in possession of a sophisticated electronic device, must be in want of a good book.

Put another way, free of the influence of Jane Austen’s famous first sentence, I just read “Pride and Prejudice” on my BlackBerry.

And, reader, I liked it. Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word, I liked it.

I liked holding it in one hand, having it always with me, and customizing my fonts and screen color. I liked reading it on the train without advertising my tastes; I could have been reading “Tropic of Cancer” or “The Firm.”

I really liked reading it in bed without the encumbrance of a book light.

I liked it all so much, I’ve moved on to Austen’s “Persuasion” and am, frankly, halfway annoyed at having to take time away from that to write this. What comeuppance will the vain spendthrift Sir Walter receive, and will his deserving daughter Anne find satisfaction?

We read e-books on our Treo all the time, mostly classics. Jane Austen’s novels and some of the minor works actually live on the hard drive of the device, along with J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt, and Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters by R.A. and William Austen-Leigh. They are with us at all times, in case of literary emergency. We also keep a rotating selection of other e-books on a removable Secure Digital card. (The photo at left shows Fanny Burney’s Cecilia on our Treo, Enrico.) All of these e-books are free to download in a large selection of e-book formats at the links above. We love being able to highlight and take notes in the e-book and then export the notes to a memo, which is handy for group discussions, all in a handheld device. Readers are available for nearly every mobile phone and/or PDA. Give it a try! We’re happy to answer any questions about e-books. Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

Novelist Josephine Cox fears that women take novels, including hers and Jane Austen’s, so seriously that their romantic relationships suffer for it.

Fewer than one in three women in their late 20s in Britain are married, compared to 85 per cent in the 1970s. If married, they become convinced that some grand passion has passed them by.

Many will point out that Jane Austen was writing romances more than 200 years ago.

Did she lead her readers astray by giving false hope and expectations? The answer, of course, is no.

In Jane Austen’s day, women had many fewer choices and less control over their lives.

Women of the 1790s were more concerned about status, stability and suitability of a possible partner.

So what is important in a marriage? Trust, followed by sharing and tolerance. I think good looks — and having oodles of money — are of far lesser importance.

That last sentence could be right out of one of Jane Austen’s novels. It is important to not get so wrapped up in a certain hero *coughDarcycough* that one overlooks the fact that Darcy is not so much Mr. Right as he is Mr. Right For Elizabeth Bennet. There is a difference, you know.

For those looking for something new and Austen-related to read, we heard from one Edward JB, who has published two alliteratively titled stories via lulu.com.

“The Shades of Udolpho,” Chapter Ten of the Editrix’s novella There Must Be Murder, has been published by the Jane Austen Centre at Bath online magazine. Other new articles at the magazine include a recipe for French pottage, the Regency layette, a review of The Jane Austen Book Club film, an article about Mary Shelley, and directions to make an heirloom baby bonnet.

That’s it for Friday Monday Weekend Bookblogging, and always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!

It is always amusing when one’s life turns into a Jane Austen novel. Currently we have the distinct pleasure of having Mr. and Mrs. George Wickham as upstairs neighbors. This is especially edifying and entertaining because the fabulous high-tech AustenBlog World Headquarters is contained within a rather old structure and we can hear all of their arguments. It’s better than anything on television.

For instance, one Saturday night, Mr. W. wanted to go to the pub and Mrs. W., apparently, did not. Begging and pleading did no good; bratty whining did no good; finally Mr. W. was driven to an extreme. He stood at the foot of the stairs (right where the plaster is cracked so the acoustics are especially good) and screamed up the stairs, “Fine! I’m going! And I’m going to find another girl and I’m going to f*** her and make sure you know about it!”

(Shockingly, Mrs. W. let him back IN when he returned a few hours later. She is a more forgiving woman than the Editrix; had Mr. W. belonged to us, he would have been sleeping on the lawn with the feral cats, surrounded by his belongings.)

This past Sunday, apparently Mr. W. had transgressed in some way, and she thought he should have brought her flowers. Mr. W. whined, “I would have BOUGHT you flowers if I had a CAR!” She opined that he could have walked around the corner to the produce place. He said he didn’t know the neighborhood well enough yet to go walking around somewhere he had never been. She whined that Mr. Denny would have bought her flowers. He countered that if he had money coming out his *** like Denny, he would have gone to college, and then he might have a car and could earn money; a rather circular argument that made us dizzy.

It is quite amusing to us that anyone could argue that Jane Austen had to “live” the experiences in her books; all she had to do was pay attention. People are so amusing; they are just like a book!

In other Austen-related book news, Alert Janeite Moe found a website with news about an upcoming Jane Austen-related book by Clare Harman, author of several biographies (including one of Fanny Burney that we have on our shelf).

My work-in-progress is Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World for Canongate Books (UK) and Henry Holt (US). It’s a history of Austen’s fame, the changing status of her work and what it has stood for, or been made to stand for, in English culture in the two hundred years since her death. Starting with Austen’s own experience as a beginning author, her difficulties getting published and her determination to succeed, I explore the history of how her estate was handled by her brother, sister, nieces and nephews, the eruption of public interest in Austen in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the making of her into a classic English author in the twentieth century, the critical wars that erupted as a result and, lastly, her powerful influence on contemporary phenomena such as chick-lit, romantic comedy, the heritage industry and film. Part biography, part cultural history, it’s a fascinating story, full of odd anecdotes and some new insights too.

It sounds great, and we look forward to reading it!

Lastly, congratulations to Laura G., whose name we drew to win a copy of Mr. Knightley’s Diary by Amanda Grange. Stay tuned for more swag from the AustenBlog Swag Trunk!

That’s it for Friday Bookblogging for this week, and always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!

We have the pleasure of presenting Miss Lydia Bennet’s Weblog, with illustrations, for your reading enjoyment. It seems there also will be a book about Lydia written by Jane Odiwe. (We’ve redacted information about the publishers which we received elsewhere and are informed is incorrect.) We also are told that Jane Odiwe’s delightful illustrations will be used in a feature about Jane Austen’s life on the Jane Austen Book Club DVD.

We also are pleased to see that several bloggers are reading Jane Austen and reporting their experience.

The Literate Kitten read Northanger Abbey and enjoyed the Gothic parody.

Of course, it ends in typical Austen fashion,